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Fall 2006 Seminar

"On the Road: Intercultural Encounters in Europe and the Americas"

Dates: August 28 - December 8, 2006

Faculty

Description of the seminar

From explorers to immigrants to tourists, ours is a world in motion. Ancient peoples followed the movement of wild game. Native Americans migrated across the continent. The Incas, Ottomans and Chinese built great empires through travel and conquest. Early modern Europeans set off to seek trade and territory. Africans were brought to the Western Hemisphere against their will. Nineteenth-century Americans looked for whatever was beyond the frontier, while their children and grandchildren visited Europe to soak up the culture. Whatever the motive, humans are rarely still.

The Fall 2006 Newberry Seminar in the Humanities will take a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary look at travel and travel writing -- surveying Europe, Latin America, and the United States -- across more than 400 years of history. The seminar will compare European experiences and texts with their New World counterparts from the United States and Latin America in the context of the Atlantic world.

Left: First page from the Lewis and Clark journal. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

The seminar will begin with several weeks of group reading and discussion, looking at travel narratives from the ages of European discovery and conquest, the American frontier, and modern culture. This reading will provide a common core for the seminar participants. Through these readings and discussions, seminar participants will encounter a representative body of travel accounts while being introduced to the collections, refining their individual research projects, and developing necessary critical perspectives.

The heart of the seminar will be students’ independent research, for which the Newberry’s collections are an ideal resource for research in travel and travel writing. The Library’s holdings describing the European exploration and settlement of North America are rich. Students can explore Cortes’s first reports from the Americas, discover how American Indians’ maps of the land compared to John Smith’s, trace how the Grand Canyon -- described by early explorers as a wasteland -- was rehabilitated as a national treasure and tourist destination.

For students particularly interested in Latin America, the Newberry’s Edward E. Ayer Collection on the American Indian and the William B. Greenlee Collection on Portuguese and Brazilian history will be very useful. For students with 19th- and 20th-century interests, the Newberry offers extensive holdings in European and North American travel guides, rare accounts of U.S. tourists abroad, and documents and ephemera relating to the development of the railroads in North America. The Library’s extensive cartography collection has a wealth of maps and atlases, from 15th-century portolan charts that guided sailors through the Mediterranean to 20th-century tourist road maps of the American West.

This seminar will present many opportunities for students in a variety of fields. Historians will be able to delve into voyages of discovery and conquest, colonial life, independence movements, slavery, and the experience of Native Americans. Philosophers can consider how travel accounts influenced Rousseau’s conception of human nature. Students interested in literature can look at fictional and non-fictional travel narratives, including first editions of More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and many more.

Students of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian studies will have much to work with, including the growth of literature in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies and subsequent republics. Those in religious studies will be able to look at 400 years of Catholicism in Spain and the Americas, religious practices of Native Americans, and African traditions in the New World such as vodun, santería, and macumba.